Abstract

Businesses today must be fast and flexible, responsive to customers, and cost effective in their operations. They must collaborate more frequently with partners to build virtual organizations and supply-chains that reduce times-to-market and costs. E-business is the use of the Internet along with other electronic means and technologies to conduct within-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and business-to-government interactions. A basic model of an e-business is the e-shop model, which is based on providing a self-service storefront to a customer by displaying the company catalogs and product offers on a Web site. An e-procurement model focuses on the buying aspect of the business. A typical architecture for e-procurement consists of a browser-based self-service front-end to the corporate purchasing system or its ERP. The supplier catalogs are presented to end-users through a single unified catalog, thereby facilitating a corporate-wide standard procurement process. Online auction models have also received much attention for automating dynamic trading. Other models are based on creating value-chain businesses, such as service provisioning of specific functions for the value-chain, and electronic payments or logistics.